“Terror Mixed With Pain, Torture” (1854–56), Guillaume-Benjamin-Amant Duchenne (de Boulogne)
In my late-night TV watching, I keep seeing these very brief but very disturbing ads: A person is in an awkward situation — elevator doors repeatedly closing on them, kids carving “I ❤️ DAD” on the side of the family minivan — for a mere two to three seconds, then we cut to a checkout guy at a supermarket, who’s facing, it turns out, a flayed, skinless person, their naked musculature on full display, joyfully eating a protein pudding. Finally, we cut back to the original person for another second or two. And… scene!
What is this? Why is this? The first time I saw one of these 15-second spots, I’d popped a THC gummy to help me sleep, and I suspected I might be hallucinating. Then, the next night, fully sober, I saw the ads again, this time with my wife, who was just as confused.
Now, I don’t mind weirdness. In fact, I love weird! Still, I’m perplexed. These are ads for protein pudding. In what universe are flayed humans a persuasive pitch for protein pudding? The voiceover tries to make a connection between what your “body” needs and this protein pudding, but the sudden, disorienting cuts and the image of a skinless fucking human being completely overwhelm that attempt. These ads are wonderfully, horribly terrible! Even as they haunt my imagination, I’m so, so glad they exist. And I’m hoping other companies follow their lead: skeletons in Ozempic ads, thumbscrews for the Xbox, Carnival Cruise aspirants being torn apart by wild horses…
Today’s email is not a normal one
I haven’t had the time or the concentration this week to finish a real essay, so instead you’re getting bits and bobs. And everyone love bits and bobs, right?
First up, here’s a piece I recently wrote for Inverse.com, whose editor asked me to keep a sleep diary for a week for … reasons? If you’ve ever wanted to know how a 51-year-old Brooklyn dad makes it through the night, this is it!
Some great screenwriting
Ten minutes after she left to catch the 2 train to school this morning, my older daughter, Sasha, called to say she’d forgotten her Yondr pouch. That’s the pocket-sized neoprene Faraday cage into which New York City public school students are now required to put their cell phones when they show up for classes. Leaving yours behind isn’t that big a deal — they have extras at school — but Sasha was planning to join today’s ICE-protest walkout, and wanted her phone with her. If she used a school Yondr pouch, she wouldn’t be able to retrieve her phone till 4:30 p.m. So, she asked, could we bring it to her?
Um, no. It was 6 degrees out! (It’s now 9.) Couldn’t she call one of her protesting friends, I said, and ask to share a pouch? Fine, fine — she’d do that.
Almost one hour later, sitting at this very desk and beginning to think about writing this newsletter, I heard a yelp from the other room. It was Sasha’s younger sister, Sandy, who it turned out had just stepped on the Yondr pouch and had punctured her foot on the little magnetic spike that seals it closed. She was fine, minimal blood, minimal pain, no big deal. What was lovely was the subtle continuity of detail in this real-life event — the kind of coincidental dramatic centrality of a child’s forgotten item. How will it play out over the rest of the day? Will Sasha share a pouch with a friend? Or will she be temporarily phone-less for much of the day? What will that mean at a teenage political protest?
So far, reality’s writing has been good: consequential, but not overblown. I’m hoping the rest of the day successfully builds on this smart opening.
The best gas masks
I am thinking of investing in a few of these — you know, just in case.
‘Faces of Death’ is back!
The other day, I started my essay with a reminiscence of Faces of Death, the documentary-esque movie series that purported to show lots of people and animals actually dying in miserable ways. Well, I was really onto something! It turns out that Sony is releasing a new Faces of Death movie, only this one is, according to Polygon, “the fictionalized story of the female moderator of an online video platform whose job is to remove offensive content. When she finds a group of people who are recreating the murders seen in the 1978 Faces of Death, she has to figure out if they're real or not in an era of AI fakery.” Fun!
I was going to embed the teaser trailer right here, but it’s already been removed from YouTube for violating their policy on “violent or graphic content.” The teenage horror fan in me is already salivating…
‘The Mythology of Conscious AI’
Last year, my book club read Being You, an exploration of the “new science” of consciousness by the neuroscientist Anil Seth. At the time, I found it a little dull and hard to get through — but ever since, I have not stopped thinking about it: about the ways in which we can now measure consciousness, about the importance of the our brains being “embodied.” It’s very good! And now Seth has a great new essay in Noema about whether AI can ever be truly conscious:
Consciousness, in contrast to intelligence, is mostly about being. Half a century ago, the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously offered that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism.” Consciousness is the difference between normal wakefulness and the oblivion of deep general anesthesia. It is the experiential aspect of brain function and especially of perception: the colors, shapes, tastes, emotions, thoughts and more, that give our lives texture and meaning. The blueness of the sky on a clear day. The bitter tang and headrush of your first coffee.
AI systems can reasonably lay claim to intelligence in some form, since they can certainly do things, but it is harder to say whether there is anything-it-is-like-to-be ChatGPT.
‘Whenever Saigon got depressing I went to the zoo’
When I lived in Ho Chi Minh City, I was always fascinated by the Saigon Zoo, which was run-down and occasionally horrifying — but which continued to exist, to serve some kind of purpose for the city and its people. Recently, the writer Connla Stokes took a deep dive into the zoo’s history:
When I made my return visit in early 2025, I arrived by bicycle at about 4.45pm and coughed up (digitally) a paltry VND 60,000 ($2.40) for a ticket. Even before I got to the motorbike park, I could tell that the place was heaving with families and child-free young couples. Like Lewis, I was visiting on a Sunday. But not a typical Sunday. It was the fifth day of Tet (so still a national holiday) a giddy atmosphere prevailed. Kids zoomed around a ‘car track’ in electric toy cars with flashing lights (mimicking the traffic that most of us had come to escape). Candy floss vendors and ice cream vendors flogged their goods. Scores of punters were pouring in and out of the gates, blithely strolling past a bust of Jean-Baptiste Louis Pierre (1833 - 1905), a key figure in the development of the gardens (and other green spaces in colonial Saigon). The petrified Pierre looked just as unimpressed as I felt to hear, in the distance, Boney M playing over the speakers and an MC doing his best to rev up a small audience of children and their parents.
Let’s end with Eakins
I like this one.
“The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull)” (1871), Thomas Eakins
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1 Presumably, they’ve been cut down from longer versions to fit into tiny ad slots.